Lord Ahmed regrets that his Woody Allen SatNav made him look like a racist

LORD Ahmed has issued a “complete and unreserved” for saying Jews were behind his imprisonment for dangerous driving. It turns out that wasn’t Jews who made him drive dangerously and slam into car driven by a man who died as a result. Ahmed’s SatNav was not calibrated to feature the voice of Woody Allen’s Rabbi Virgil Starkwell telling him to “Dive, schmive. Go on drive, already so fast” into the car that’s come to halt in the fast lane. “Go! Send your texts messages. Speed and kill a father of two. Who is this Martin Gombar? Is he from a good family? Does he have a nice word to say about you?”

“I only believe in facts and to be honest I should have stuck with the facts rather than with conspiracy theories. I completely and unreservedly apologise to the Jewish community, to the judiciary, to the newspaper owners.”

Newspaper owners like Lord Rothemere, were he alive, would have been mightily offended to have been called a Jew. Plenty of coppers would have been revolted. Kosher pigs. As if!

But why did Ahmed say what he did to a receptive Pakistani audience?

“I cannot honestly say why. It must have been a twisted mind that said those things.”

A twisted mind? Not his mind. Not his mouth relying the thoughts of his brain. Not ‘my’ twisted mind. Just ‘a’ twisted mind. Why did he wait so long to finger this twisted mind? Why not own up when he saw the video?

“I was horrified because this is not me… I could not believe that this was me.”

No. That man looked like a racist. But Ahmed says he is “not anti-Semitic”.

Mehdi Hasan writes:

He did refer to “Yehudis” [Jews], did he not? “Yes, ‘Yehudis’.” He adds: “The thing is that in Urdu there is no word for ‘Zionist’.”

So. All Jews are Zionists, even the ones who don’t live in Israel? Jews are Israel? The two are interchangeable. It’s a popular conflation around the liberals’ dinner table. Is that what Ahmed’s saying? Zionism is no longer about creating Jewish state in what many believe to be a spiritual homeland. It’s an insult. Zionists are now blood-thirsty baby killers who control the media and law. It used to be Jew that racists used as a term to signify all that was evil on planet mankind. Now it’s Zionism. The wondering demonic Jew of European folklore has become the Zionist, chief enemy to world peace and harmony.

Would accusations of a Zionist plot to send him to prison, however, be any more acceptable or believable? Thankfully, Ahmed says he “totally accepts” that it wouldn’t: “‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ is wrong, absolutely. Outrageous.” His voice gets quieter. “I don’t really have any explanation or excuse.”

Says Mehdi:

Some of his critics would argue that Ahmed has, Yasser-Arafat-style, a habit of telling a British non-Muslim audience one thing in one language and a Pakistani Muslim audience something else in another.”

So. Will Ahmed now go back on the telly in Pakistan and tell them that a “twisted mind” made him come out with such utter bilge? Set that SatNav for Islamabad….